Litany

“Litany” echoes a long tradition of love poetry which uses simile, metaphor, and other figurative language to paint a picture of a beloved person (usually a woman). These poems fall under the age-old genre of blazon, which enumerates the qualities of the beloved, describing them through exaggerated, overly flattering comparisons with natural phenomena or similarly awe-inspiring elements of the world. Famous examples of this style of love poetry range from the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, usually attributed to King Solomon, to the work of the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch, to 16th century Elizabethan poets like Edmund Spenser.

Almost as soon as the blazon became popular, however, it became the subject of mockery; the genre of counterblazon emerged to highlight the overblown nature of the hyperbolic odes to beauty and perfection that blazon love poetry produced. One famous example is William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, which inverts the pattern of flattery to declare that the beloved’s meager attractions couldn’t possibly hope to match the sublime. Collins’s poem falls into this generic response, which tends to stress the idea that real love does not and cannot depend on the unrealistic expectations of the blazon, which instead sully what is truly loveable about a specific person. In “Litany,” Collins’s makes fun of this wide-eyed tradition: True love may is not showy or grandiose, but instead is rooted in a shared sense of humor.